The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a
Patent Trial & Appeal Board decision, finding that under the
harmless error rule, the challenged claims were invalid as obvious
even if the Board erred in claim construction. Bot M8 LLC v.
Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC, Case Nos. 22-1291 (Fed.
Cir. May 9, 2023) (Prost, Reyna,
Cunningham, JJ.).
Bot M8 owns a patent related to a gaming machine that
authenticates certain data and includes both a board and a
motherboard. The independent claims require that a "game
program" is stored in memory on the board and written to the
motherboard only after the game program has been authenticated by a
central processing unit (CPU) on the motherboard (the Write
Limitation). Sony Interactive Entertainment petitioned for
inter partes review (IPR). Ultimately, the Board
determined that the challenged claims were unpatentable as obvious.
Bot M8 appealed.
